by Glory Edim
The myth that Star Trek planted in my mind: People like me exist in the future, but there are only a few of us. Something’s obviously going to kill off a few billion people of color and the majority of women in the next few centuries. And despite it being, y’know, the future, my descendants’ career options are going to be even more limited than my own.
Fortunately in 1992, reality gave me a better myth: Mae Jemison became the first black woman in space. She wasn’t the goddamn receptionist. Only after that came Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, with its much-vaunted black captain.
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In the present, black people can be anything they want to be.
This is not true. Yet.
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For a long time, I was ashamed that I wrote science fiction and fantasy.
I write a little of everything—cyberpunk, dark fantasy, slipstream, space opera, liminal fantasy. But it bothered me most to write epic fantasy because, well, as far as I knew, epic fantasy was Tolkien’s British mythos. It was D&D campaigns writ large with stalwart pale-skinned people killing Always Chaotic Evil dark-skinned people, if the latter were even given the courtesy of being called people. It was doorstopper-sized novels whose covers were emblazoned with powerful-looking white characters brandishing enormous phallic symbols; it was stories set in medieval pseudo-England about bookworms or farmboys becoming wealthy, mighty kings and getting the (usually blond) girl. Epic fantasy was certainly not black women doing…well, anything.
And that’s because there were no black women in the past, right? There will be no black women in the future. There have never been black women in any speculated setting. There are black women in reality, but that reality is constrained within wholly different myths from what’s seen in fantasy novels. (The Welfare Queen. The Music Video Ho. The Jezebel. The Help.)
And once upon a time I wondered: Is writing epic fantasy not somehow a betrayal? Did I not somehow do a disservice to my own reality by paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men?
But. Epic fantasy is not merely what Tolkien made it.
This genre is rooted in the epic—and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there that feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs. The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage. I haven’t even begun to explore the non-African stuff. So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible…how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?
And how dare I disrespect that history, profane all my ancestors’ suffering and struggles, by giving up the freedom to imagine that they’ve won for me.
So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it—
—we all get to dream.
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In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.
WELL-READ BLACK GIRL RECOMMENDS:
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOKS BY BLACK WOMEN
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
Everfair by Nisi Shawl
Dark Matter by Sheree R. Thomas
I still don’t know how I gathered the courage to email Claudia Rankine to ask if I could interview her. I had been freelancing for various publications for over two years at this point but I was beginning to expand my portfolio into profiling public figures, wanting to avoid pigeonholing myself into only writing pieces on black trauma. I, along with many other young, black writers, found my entry into media through the Black Lives Matter movement. It was in that same year—2014, to be exact—that Rankine released her bestselling book of poetry, prose, and visual art, Citizen.
“Because white men cannot police their imagination black men are dying….”
There are so many impactful lines in this seminal work but this one stands out the most because it bridges the gap between the psyche and the tremendous destruction from which it originates. Citizen is one of those books that reminds me that black life is often like walking along a balance beam: It requires strategy and concentration, for stability is so fleeting.
Less than a day after I sent Claudia my interview request, her assistant replied and the rest was a whirlwind. I had an editor and in-house photographer for the interview, location details, and a flurry of email exchanges and question rehearsals. And then finally, I was invited to her apartment, where we sat at her kitchen table to discuss blackness and confidence under a surveillance state. Struggling to hold back tears at just being in her presence, I asked her how she prepares herself to go out into the world. She told me that it’s not that she has to prepare herself for the world; it’s that the world interrupts her.
In that response, both she and Citizen became all the more important, for I understood that as a black woman, my life is characterized by constant interruptions. Most days, I am just trying to get from point A to point B. But when I am ignored in public spaces or gas-lit for unfortunate situations, I question whether I am overreacting—or perhaps ill—as I plunge deep beneath the surface of everyday interactions to exorcise the evils of what is done to me and other marginalized people.
Citizen is a slim book of less than two hundred pages, its size almost fooling one into believing its formidability has limits. But much like the format of the book, Citizen undermines boundaries as it streamlines between criticism, nonfiction, and poetry. There are seven chapters. Seven meaning completeness or perfection. Seven signaling luck, fortune, or divine favor. Seven denoting magical properties. When I first read Citizen, I had not read another book that exposed all the aggressions black people face without the extra padding of flowery language and the diplomacy of “seeing the other side.” It is not a book for the faint of heart. Rankine strips life to the simplest denominator to draw attention to the central issue: How does one live in the midst of being wiped out?
Insecurity had often marred my formative years. I was not confident in myself as either a black girl or a woman. I second-triple-quadruple-quintuple-sextuple-guessed all of my thoughts so much that I drove my body to both mental and physical exhaustion. And then I’d do it all over again. Growing up black in America, I suppose, you get used to this obsession over who you (might) offend and the consequences of one misstep. I still remember where I was when I first read Citizen—I was getting my hair braided for the umpteenth time, and I was peeved that I finished the book too quickly, for there were more rows of my hair still left untouched by my Nigerian hairstylist’s hands. I felt both seen and validated, affirmed and justified. That is not to say that I don’t still strain myself to mull over all that I’ve said and done in the most trivial circumstances. However, I do know that no matter what kind of idiosyncrasy or habit I can’t bring myself to tackle just yet, Citizen will be there waiting for me as a talisman to get through it.
A few days after I filed that interview, it went live and was greeted with a positive reception. I was g
enerously paid for my work, and Claudia loved the work that I did. And though I had to quickly move on to other assignments—which is necessary if you freelance in New York City, where rent is too damn high—the memories of that afternoon will remain with me for quite some time. Even as I wrote my debut, I felt inspired and strengthened to magnify the world’s interruptions, those double takes in black women’s lives that deserve further introspection and analysis, no matter how messy or contradictory they may be. As I traveled on my book tour, I recounted this same story to readers and they were visibly—and audibly—moved by Claudia’s wisdom on the world and its interruptions. I am relieved that people understand the weight of this extra burden while also questioning why life could not be easier.
I am still assessing what it means to be a person in this country that reeks of its legacy of not recognizing those who looked like me as citizens. I worry about the constant glossing over of the roots of the trees that bear the rotten fruit of where we are at this political moment. But when I need a salve, a space to remind myself that there need not be any limits to my interrogation when it comes to my safety, I turn to Citizen to remember to keep on living and to document those interruptions and gaps in said living as storytelling to be passed on to another black woman and then another.
“I will write a novel this year,” I wrote in my journal with conviction. I was twenty-three, sitting at my usual table at my favorite coffee shop, a place on a busy corner with comfy couches you could park in all day if you wanted. I had moved to New York immediately after college, looking to make a way for myself in literature. Midtown, where I worked, was all steel-and-glass skyscrapers. For lunch, we ate overpriced salads from delis that catered exclusively to the besuited and miserable. The coffee shop is no longer there, I was sad to find a few years ago, replaced with a fancier coffee shop to fit the neighborhood’s new, fancier residents.
My neighborhood in central Brooklyn offered a refuge from the sanitized, soulless existence of my nine-to-five. But it was still not the New York I’d grown up in. I lived just around the corner from the coffee shop, in a building owned by a Jamaican family that had been there for generations. The eldest sister used to sit on the front steps, and on my way in or out, sometimes she’d tell me a story, like how she used to chase a young Christopher Wallace away from those same steps for hustling, many years before he became Notorious B.I.G.
It’s part of what I might call the new New York. In my mind, there are two New Yorks—the one I knew as a child of an immigrant family, and the one I came to know as an adult. They were completely different, populated by different languages, foods, music, and smells. They felt like completely separate places, almost different countries altogether. Of course, my new New York was someone else’s old New York. Though vanishing, old New York existed just below the surface of the neighborhood I’d moved into. Someone else’s family home, someone’s favorite lunch counter, and someone’s newsstand were there also, but you had to look hard to find them amidst the farm-to-table restaurants and wine bars. The Jamaican family was bought out halfway through our lease. In an effort to push us out to raise the rent, the new landlords stopped doing maintenance. Things broke and weren’t fixed, and our house flooded with mice. I camped out at the coffee shop regularly to escape.
It was in that apartment, in that coffee shop, and on the subway between work and home, that I read Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. It told the story of Selina Boyce, a headstrong Bajan girl living in a Caribbean American community in Brooklyn. The story revolves around the family’s house, a stately old brownstone in the farther reaches of Brooklyn, and their struggle to keep the house as a battle to maintain their identity. It was the story of every immigrant family in America, every old neighborhood that had become a new neighborhood. And the characters looked and sounded like my family.
We even shared a last name. My family is also named Boyce. We come from a small village in Trinidad where, my grandmother once told me, “there were more goats than people.” My father’s grandmother, Ena Boyce, moved to a Queens neighborhood much like Selina Boyce’s in the 1950s. In my time in the city as an adult, I learned this was a neighborhood most people I knew only passed through on the way to John F. Kennedy airport. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like for most people to arrive at JFK, how they must take the airport workers’ island lilt for granted. For me, it feels like home.
Everyone there spoke in a variation of this lilt—from Jamaicans to Bajans to Grenadans to Trinidadians. It seemed every tiny island near ours was represented there. We lived in Philadelphia, but journeyed there for every holiday and summer break. I remember the countless hours spent snaking through traffic on I-95 on Thanksgivings and Christmases. On weekends, we bought goat curry and oxtails at one of the many West Indian lunch counters on Linden Boulevard.
In the 1960s, Ena saved enough to buy a three-bedroom, semi-detached house on a nice block. Just like the Boyces of Brown Girl, Brownstones, our family’s story also revolved around this house. My great-grandmother worked as a caretaker for white families for years in order to buy it. Even though she was married, she was the breadwinner of our family. As is the case for many immigrant families in America, that house was an anchor for our extended family, hosting brothers, cousins, great-nieces and -nephews, and friends over the years as they gained a foothold in the new country. When the three bedrooms were no longer enough, they converted the basement into an apartment with a bathroom. She had so many boarders cycle through, I often had no idea who was staying down there until they popped up for dinner.
The New York of my childhood bore no relation to the New York of my adulthood. In this new New York, accents were rare, as most people spoke with private school refinement. I hadn’t gone to private school but I had gone to an expensive college, which was my entry ticket to this world. Sometimes I wondered what my friends—the citizens of this new New York—would think of my family’s neighborhood in Queens. I imagined how they’d react when they learned my family slept three to a room and felt grateful for the privilege. For them, sharing an apartment with two twenty-somethings was an indignity.
Three years into my time in new New York, I was beginning to doubt whether it fit me. I was still at my nine-to-five, but the whole exercise had begun to go stale. What started as a lunchtime ritual of eating at my desk and writing had ballooned. I was spending hours, sometimes entire afternoons, working away on a novel. If I hadn’t yet quit that job, my mind had long ago. I started taking long train rides deep into the city, in search of someplace new, someplace I belonged.
I fell in love with the old limestone mansions of Stuyvesant Heights, a neighborhood at the southeastern edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, adjacent to East New York. I searched for months, visited a handful of unsuitable spaces before coming across an ad for a room in an old brownstone on Hancock Avenue. The ad offered no pictures of the space, just a one-paragraph description of an apartment in an old building, lovingly restored by its owner. Anyone else would have passed over it with rightful suspicion, but I took the inauspiciousness of the ad as a sign that it had been meant just for me. I called immediately and wasn’t surprised when the place turned out to be perfect.
On weekends, instead of meeting up with friends, I’d spend hours reading in my room, then wandering the streets, notebook in hand, bursting with inspiration. None of my friends would venture all the way out to my neighborhood, trapped as they were in the gravitational pull of their new New Yorks. I didn’t mind; I barely noticed. I couldn’t read enough. I found new authors, discovered books by authors I thought I knew well. This was my first education in the practice of being a writer.
I was happier there than I had been in years. I spent hours strolling bustling Fulton Street, lined with old laundromats and delis, and the occasional new restaurant started by hopeful citizens who could smell the renaissance (along with the promise of new residents and their cash) in the air. Something felt familiar about that
place—something about the scale of the buildings, the array of the streets and position of the subway entrances. Somehow I had been there before.
Looking for an explanation, eventually I returned to Brown Girl, Brownstones. There, I found my answer. The old brownstone of the novel had an address: 501 Hancock Street, Brooklyn. My apartment was only a few doors away. I looked out my living room window and spied the address across the street. It was a tall, thin stone building that looked almost identical to mine. I had passed by it a million times and thought nothing of it.
I saw myself in Selina Boyce. Just like her, I was a young woman my family couldn’t understand, caught somewhere between old and new worlds. A family that looked and spoke just like mine. I could walk the same streets she named, could imagine myself in that beautiful house her characters worked so hard to keep. For the first time since returning to New York, I saw old New York amidst the new. I felt proud of where I came from, and at long last, proud to write its story.
To paint a picture of my childhood: My mother, Ruby Nottage, was a schoolteacher and principal in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, at the elementary school that both she and my grandmother attended as children. My father, Wallace Nottage, was a successful social worker for most of his career, until he suffered a severe back injury and struggled for years to heal and re-find his footing. My parents were people who led very practical, pragmatic lives. But they were also what I like to call “nexus people”—as they were very interested in connecting people, and were also invested in the culture at large. My father was an incredible speed reader; he particularly enjoyed nonfiction and liked to have robust conversations about books and articles he’d read. And my mother, though she didn’t read quite as much as he did, loved conversation and gatherings. She was a feminist, community organizer, and political activist who believed that every day one should do a little something to improve not only your own life, but those of others. She had this wonderful laugh that drew people to her, a trait she inherited from her own mother, Waple Newton, who was a great raconteur and never left a room without leaving her mark.